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Category Archives: Bounce Rate

Twitter is an incredibly useful tool which can be used to help boost your business to higher levels, but if you aren’t aware of the best practices then you won’t be able to unlock the full marketing potential available to you.

As with anything that’s as lucrative as Twitter is, people like to figure out the way it works and how to gain the most benefit from using the platform. This leads to research which you can take advantage of to help your numbers soar, using the Twitter machine correctly to increase the amount of interaction on your posts. It’s all about boxing clever – if there’s statistics out there which identify the best times for you to send out your tweets doing the opposite isn’t going to help you get the level of interaction that you’d like to see in return for you efforts.

So let’s crack into the numbers and find out how you can be efficient in the way you tweet.

Hashtags

When it comes to hashtags the most important aspect is research, there isn’t any point in using a hashtag that’s had no traction over the past 12 months. Make sure people will see it and it’s worth your time placing it into your tweet. On top of making your own searches to find out information there are tools such as http://hashtagify.me/ which gives data on specific hashtags and those relating to it.

If you’re creating your own hashtags there are a few must do’s to make sure they work. Make you hashtag short and concise, being straight to the point is a necessity here. It should also be recognisable and easy to follow.

Hashtags can either work for or against you. They’re great for getting your tweets found through searches and hook you into conversation topics but becoming hashtag happy can actually have an adverse effect to your tweet. One or two hashtags can significantly boost your user tweet, tweets with hashtags see twice the amount of engagement than those without but engagement in tweets that use more than two hashtags actually drop by 17%. #dontgetgreedy

Timing

Time can play a big factor in the engagement your tweets see. “Busy times” are the best times for you to put out your content, between 8AM and 7PM is where the largest engagement of tweets is to be found. This time period sees an increase of 30% than between 8PM and 7AM. Statistics show that the weekend is also a good time to send tweets, people are obviously using their downtime to browse Twitter as a spike in engagement of 17% is found over weekdays.

Another timing factor is frequency, over tweeting can become harmful to your brand. Putting out too many tweets in a short period of time can turn off users from your feed and even lose you followers. To make sure you keep on top of this it may be use for you to create a schedule for your tweets, knowing when to send out a tweet and what content it’ll include in advance can be a great time saver and make sure you don’t fall into the traps of over or under tweeting.

Wording

Keep your tweets conversational, the best type of tweet is one which is professional but not overly formal, making sure to exclude business jargon from you posts. This kind of tweet is something a user would be more likely to interactive with by replying, retweeting or favouriting.

The type of words used can also have a large impact on the viewer of the tweet, for instance imperative words telling the user to do something like ‘look’, ‘see’ or ‘make’ work very well. Including superlatives is also a good way of ‘bigging up’ your content and drawing eyes towards your tweet and helping push people towards clicking the containing links, try adding phrases like ‘the best’, ‘the most’ or ‘blow your mind’.

When it comes to the amount of words you may have 140 characters to use but it’s been found that using 100 characters is actually the optimal number for a tweet. As with your hashtags, keep your tweets direct, concise and to the point.

Content

Images are extremely useful in boosting engagement on your tweets, including an image to a tweet can draw in 2 times the amount of engagement than those without. In a sample of 100 tweets the tweets with images saw 18% more click-throughs, 89% more favourites, and 150% more retweets. Those numbers speak for themselves.

It’s also worth directly asking for retweet, it may go against you initial thought but the numbers show that asking a user for a retweet does in fact work. Asking for a ‘RT’ can see your retweets increase 12 times, if you spell out ‘retweet’ you could reach up to a mammoth 23 times your normal retweets! For such a large boost this tactic is only used by 1% of Twitter users. Give it a shot and see how much on a increase you see.

Connections

If you’ve got a large Twitter following you can use this to help create connections with bloggers, if you see a blogger writing articles about the field you are in you can create a partnership where in return for solid backlinks from a reputable blog you can share their feature with your twitter base. It’s also a well you can return to because both parties are happy with the results they see, more exposure for them, better SEO rankings from the backlinks for you! A real win-win scenario.

Here is a base for you to work on for making tweets that are well received and return great engagement. Test these initial pointers on your upcoming tweets and see what improvements you can gain, add in your own research down the line and you can become a tweeting great.

When marketing a site online you need to remember the importance of a good first impression. Most landing pages will consist of a pretty photo, heading, sub-heading, the must-know information about a service or product followed by the nice-to-know stuff…

The target audience of your landing page is the first thing you will need to identify and understand; this will determine how copy is displayed. Should you compress data (keep it simple) or be really informative.

Whilst on the topic of copy, try to avoid multiple CTA’s (Call To Actions) on a page. If time/energy is focused on one goal you are more likely to convert. What goal is most important to you – Are you looking for online enquires, sales, customer data, new members, increased brand awareness etc…

A good first impression is very important, below is a page we recently created for a client and his PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign. It takes into account the points mentioned above, offering basic information on a service they offer with a clear call to action.

Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions, the team at Tidy Design would be delighted to discuss and assist in any brand development work you may have. Thank you for reading.

There are many ways to start developing a new website; you could start writing the code, create a couple of mock-ups in Photoshop, map out page layouts on a whiteboard or in a notepad…

Information architecture (IA) is an important part of web design however it can often get overlooked. This could be the result of a small development budget or an “ASAP” deadline. How developers allocate their time will certainly impact the overall cost and ETA of a project.

A lot of thought/planning should go into a new website, be it a single page site or full-blown web application – Structural design and information is very important. If you require assistance mapping out a website then please visit our Web Design Process page. Good luck and thanks for visiting…

Google Analytics is one of many useful tools for any website owner to utilise in order to gain valuable insights into web traffic. One way to measure the popularity of your website is by the number of unique visitors it attracts.

This figure (along with pageviews) can be useful when looking to develop or add new content to your site. Also, you could quote these ‘unique visitor’ stats to potential advertisers or investors.

By measuring unique visitors over a given period of time, it is possible to report on your online performance. Google Analytics offer many useful tools, one of which is their ‘Unique Visitors’ report. This gives insight into the people who access your site and allows you to gather important information on website usage.

A unique visitor report indicates the number of people who have visited your site over a set period. A unique visitor to your website is only counted once, so refreshing the page will not increase the total.

As a business you will of course be keen to keep an eye on how many unique visitors your site attracts over time, in order to ensure that new content and SEO is generating new visitors, as well as retaining existing customers attention too.

Looking for a landing page or website that generates your business more enquires? We love working with our clients to develop and deliver quality SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaigns.

Above is a landing page we created earlier this month linked to a flyer campaign one of our awesome clients is running next year. As Tidy designed the flyer, website and logo it was pretty easy for us to develop a landing page that was consistent with the ISO Certification Services brand.

When it comes to creating a call to action (be it a landing page or web page) converting visitors into enquiries or sign-ups should be top of your agenda! Less is often more, don’t overload your page with graphics or distract the user with lots of links and banners. Keeping it simple is key.

If you are looking for a SEM (Search Engine Marketing) company based in Portsmouth, Hampshire then please do contact the team at Tidy Design today! We would be delighted to discuss any SEM ideas you have or help map out your online marketing campaigns… Thanks for visiting!

A great website is one that provides valuable resources to its visitors, both unique and repeat! Getting to know your website audience is therefore pretty important, it is data that can be used to help grow your business.

If your company is investing in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) or PPC (Pay Per Click) then you should already be getting plenty of traffic to your site. Your next job is to turn this traffic into a loyal fan base or generate sales; a return on investment is a must for any SEO or PPC campaign.

The above data (taken 22nd Nov) shows Tidy Design has grown a lot in 2012, this year shows more than double the unique visitors of 2011, but did all this traffic really generate more business?? Looking at the figures I guess it did, however lets not forget those all important customer recommendations and the repeat work we get… These are also mega important factors for any business!

Anyway, over the next few weeks I will be looking to improve and develop our Tidy Design website, analysing data from 2011 and 2012, the words “call to action” ringing in my ears as I breakdown our top pages… Lots of fun ahead, wish me luck!

With 2013 around the corner, are you looking to make your website look festive and fun in time for Christmas 2012? This month we have been updating several client sites, the most recent being the Queen’s Hotel.

So, let me ask you a question: Have you though much about your marketing and web development budget for 2013? Are you looking to improve or develop your existing website, maybe invest in SEO?

The next few weeks are really important for all us tidy business folk, can you believe it’s the end of another year!!! With this in mind, surely we should be making the time to reflect and plan… Planning as they say is everything!

Today I decided to create a new category on our blog titled ‘SEO Myth’; each post will touch base on an SEO related statement, the kind that should raise alarm bells for you and your business! Over the next few months I aim to post lots of these SEO Myth’s to help teach / explain the SEO process.

The first SEO statement you don’t want to hear:

“We can help you optimise your website by improving your meta keywords”

Google’s Matt Cutts posted on his blog sometime ago:

“…We wanted to debunk that misconception, at least as it regards to Google. Google uses over two hundred signals in our web search rankings, but the keywords meta tag is not currently one of them, and I don’t believe it will be.”

So… If Google does not use ‘meta tag keywords’ to help calculate SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), and you hear “We can help you optimise your website by improving your meta keywords” then what should you do? You guessed it, tell them not to waste your time! When it comes to marketing your business online, money and time would be better spent developing other key areas within your website. Changing your meta keywords tag won’t make your website rank higher.

Please don’t get meta keywords mixed up with meta descriptions and page titles, after all, Google doesn’t disregard all meta tags! To help improve your clickthrough rate and lower your bounce rate, meta descriptions and titles should all be unique, relevant, and truly represent the content on a page.

If you have any thoughts or feedback on meta tag keywords or SEO then please feel free to post them below, as always it is great to hear from our awesome blog readers… Until next time, keep it Tidy!

If you are serious about marketing and developing your online business, then getting thousands of unique and repeat visitors each month is just half the battle! A good SEO or web marketing campaign will tackle a variety of site issues, possibly identifying things you did not initially consider, such as page / domain authority or bounce rate!

So, what is a bounce rate and why should you care about it?

Well… A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that left your site from the entrance (landing) page. A website bounce rate is a metric to measure page and visitor quality, the higher a high bounce rate the more people are leaving your site, thus not finding what they are looking for.

The challenge here is to make your landing page as interesting and relevant as possible, making more visitors stay on your site, lowering the bounce rate. Pages within your website should deliver information, services and products that were promised in the ad copy or search result, AKA your title text and meta description… So don’t title it ‘Second hand computer for sale in Portsmouth’ if a page contains info on ‘new printers for sale in Chichester!

People who land on your site may bounce away by clicking on a link to another website, hitting the back button or closing the browser… For whatever reason people do decide to leave, it is not a good one! The task here is to keep people interested, convert traffic into business and keep people browsing your website for as long as they need to!

I did some research on the web and came across the figure of 40% as a decent bounce rate… Some of the sites we work on have seen much lower, around 20%!

I guess the average bounce rate will depend heavily on the type of site / business you are in… Adding quality content, read more links and providing value to visitors should keep people interested (regardless of the sector)! In other words, having a single page website is not going to give you a low bounce rate, in fact the opposite! However, a single page site may work for you and your business… In that case, the bounce rate is not a worthwhile metric to monitor.

Understanding how visitors use and react with your website is valuable information to have, especially if you run a business! Knowing your bounce rate will allow you to address certain pages within a site, the kind people don’t get on with and the pages people like to visit!

Please feel free to post your thoughts and opinions below, we would love to hear from businesses trying to lower a bounce rate, or better understand the principles of SEO and web marketing… Whatever you decide to do next in terms of developing your site and online business, good luck!

TidyDesign

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Here at Tidy Design our mission is simple; to deliver a return on investment, be it for our customers or the staff we employ, working together we will do better. Each day we set out to offer our customers a quality service, the goal being to leave a long lasting and positive impression. Happy customers result in repeat business.

The staff we employ are very important to Tidy Design, our ethos is to look after each other and grow together. We aim to learn and do better in all aspects of life, this mindset is key to growth and development.

TidyDesign

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